CPU

It's been revealed that with iOS 9, Apple has given developers the choice of limiting their app to run on iPhones and iPads with 64-bit CPUs. While iOS 9 itself is capable of running on a large number of Apple's older devices, developers now have the ability of specifying that previous generations of hardware cannot run their apps. The reason is not to be mean or make owners of said devices angry, but rather to ensure devices will be compatible with the app being offered, and that they don't run the software poorly.

MediaTek, one of the leading processor manufacturers for mobile device chipsets, is expanding its newest generation processor family, Helio, by introducing the P series chips. The P10 is a slim, 8 core processor. What this means for mobile device manufacturers, is that they have a the new chip to work with for handsets that aren't going to get an expensive 10 core processor, let alone an extreme performance 20 core processor like last month's MediaTek announcement, the Helio X20. Whereas, the X20 has flagship written all over it, the P10 looks like it will be for future mid to upper range handsets.

If you're a smartphone company that doesn't make its own mobile processors, you're at a disadvantage. Xiaomi isn't at the scale to follow Apple and Samsung and dive into quite silicon yet - though the increasingly popular manufacturer is growing rapidly - but that doesn't mean the latest Mi Note Pro doesn't have a performance edge over Snapdragon 810-powered rivals like the HTC One M9. Usually they're rarer than hen's teeth in North America, so you can consider me curious when I had the opportunity to do some benchmarking with the fettled phone.

How many cores does your smartphone have? If it's anything less than ten - and it's almost certain to be - then MediaTek has just eclipsed it, its new Helio X20 mobile processor packing a whopping ten cores. The company calls it Tri-Cluster architecture, and is promising the usual mantra of simultaneous power and efficiency. Still, before we discount the chip as just another case of "more is better" thinking, there could well be something to MediaTek's approach.

In an industry which sees the latest and greatest outdated within months or even weeks, sticking around for fifty years is impressive indeed. Then again, Moore's Law - the infamous observation on how computer chip density increases exponentially over time - is anything but a constant, instead more a ticking metronome that has variously haunted and chivied the electronics world into constant movement.

Just three days ago, Google announced the arrival of Android 5.1 and even highlighted some of the new feature for users. Although the Nexus devices are unsurprisingly first in line to get the update, roll out is equally unsurprisingly slow. That said, there is one huge reason why Nexus 6 owners might be excited to get the update, or even tempted to sideload it themselves, as soon as possible. Developer Francisco Franco reveals that more than just end user benefits, the update will significantly boost the performance and responsiveness of Google's first phablet.

The first phones running Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810, like the HTC One M9 announced yesterday, may only just be arriving, but the chip firm couldn't help but tease its next-gen silicon. The Snapdragon 820 isn't expected to begin sampling until the second half of 2015, but Qualcomm decided that there was no better place than Mobile World Congress to slip out a few early details about what might be powering your smartphone upgrade in 2016.

The pace of mobile chip development is relentless, something Qualcomm knows better than most with its new Snapdragon 810. Announced nearly a year ago, yet only set to show up in commercial phones and tablets in the coming months, the new Snapdragon arrives at a challenging time in mobile: raw performance simply isn't enough to win customers any more. So, it was with expectations broader than for just another fast chip that I sat down in Qualcomm's San Diego offices, the new Mobile Developer Platform (MDP) tablet and phone in front of me. After the cut, yes, there are benchmarks, but pure potency isn't all that you should care about.

US supercomputers are having to grow up, with a wider set of tasks the machines at Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories are being asked to do by the researchers, national security teams, and others given access to them demanding a change in architecture in order to keep them flexible. IBM and NVIDIA are upgrading two supercomputers - Sierra at Lawrence Livermore, and Summit at Oak Ridge - using IBM's support for the open-source OpenPOWER standard, increasing the interconnect speed of the CPU and GPU processors responsible for doing all the heavy-duty crunching. In fact, so the companies claim, there'll be as much as a tenfold cut in processing time for real-world applications.

As if on cue, LG has finally acknowledged that it has indeed been working on a mobile processor of its own. And it isn't called Odin anymore. Opting for a stranger name instead, LG has announced the LG NUCLUN. This octa-core ARM chip sports the usual mix of Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 cores, but it does bring one very appealing feature to the table right from the get go. This NUCLUN chip boasts of support for LTE-A Cat. 6 networks, advertised to be three times faster than 4G LTE.

Samsung has an announcement, but unfortunately it isn't related to the rain of lollipops over the Internet. Or rather, it can be taken as indirectly related to Android 5.0 Lollipop too. The Korean electronics giant has just announced the newest member of its Exynos SoC family with a substantial jump in model number. The Exynos 7 Octa, with four Cortex-A57 and four Cortex-A53 cores, is one of the very few to be made using a 20 nm process. Curiously, Samsung isn't even mentioning the fact that this is a 64-bit chip.

Google has just given the go signal for developers to start giving some thought to making their apps 64-bit ready in time for the next Android release. This comes with the release of a new emulator image for Android L preview, confirming that the next Android version will indeed be ready for a 64-bit mobile world. Whether that will translate into something that end users will actually be able to notice and appreciate will largely depend on the marriage between the software and the hardware.